This notion that industry needs regulating keeps ending us up in one disaster after another.
Who was it who said "when buying and selling are legislated, the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators?"
Who was it who said "when buying and selling are legislated, the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators?"
Not saying this is enough but no one is exploding these things for profit.
They refused to build a blast wall and congress defunded inspections so the last one was in the 90s so there was never any enforcement.
Some types of industry do risk lives. Don't confuse safety regulations with other business regulations. They serve completely different purposes.
We should regulate the hell out of fertilizer depots, power generators, medical software, flight. For good reason.
If you want to place some in the middle of a city, they will be close to a lot of people, and if their emissions kill people, it's probably not a good idea to place them near lots of people. But they have been placed pretty much everywhere. It appears that either you're overstating the dangers, or we're both about to die any second now.
Gov. Perry got a little steamed when his "Business is Booming" campaign was highlighted:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/perry-disgusted-by-ca...
Edit: better story link to cartoon.
There exists swathes of practically unlicensed spectrum, such as ham radio and 2.4GHz. While regulation exists, large scale enforcement is pretty much unheard of, yet it works pretty well.
The big cellular telecom standards (GSM and CDMA) assume a very orderly environment (contrasting the 801.11x standards that are more adaptive), so they would probably look different in a world with unregulated airwaves.
EDITED to add: For the purpose of such a thought experiment, It's not practical to imagine what would happen if the current GSM 2G and 3G spectrum just became unlicensed overnight. There is a huge infrastructure investment, both on the carrier and consumer ends that would become worthless, and this is clearly undesirable. Rather, imagine a block of airwaves (say, ex-military or analogue broadcast TV) being released with zero or minimal regulation (no exclusivity, basically).
What's more, it's hardly clear that you've got this proverb the right way around: It seems as likely that corrupt legislators create regulation to enrich them and their kind, as opposed to well-intentioned regulation leading to the corruption of legislators. I've cut out the middle - corrupt legislators creating corrupt legislation - which is what we actually have and also the sort of murk that doesn't lend itself to witticism.